


five drinks Ben Solo has never tried (and one that’s his favorite)

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Crack Treated Semi-Seriously, Drinking, F/M, RAISE A GLASS TO FREEDOM, Regrets I've had a few, raise a fourth glass to ben's pretty eyes, raise a third glass to jokes about moof-milking, raise another glass to bad decisions, stop raising glasses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 20:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18350960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: “Wait wait wait,” Poe Dameron says, looking slightly more tousled than usual, one hand wrapped around a half-drunk bottle of Corellian ale as he waves the other hand to halt the conversation. “You’re telling me you’ve never been drunk? Ever?”Across the table from him, Ben Organa-Solo—the man formerly known as Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, former Supreme Leader of the First Order, son of darkness, heir apparent to whatever, etc etc—glowers, a muscle in his jaw tightening and flexing as he stares Poe down.“No,” he finally says. “I have not.”





	five drinks Ben Solo has never tried (and one that’s his favorite)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [selunchen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/selunchen/gifts).



> Selina, you bring so much to fandom with all of your creative offerings! I hope you like my take on your Ben's Bad Day artwork series.

“Wait wait wait,” Poe Dameron says, looking slightly more tousled than usual, one hand wrapped around a half-drunk bottle of Corellian ale as he waves the other hand to halt the conversation. “You’re telling me you’ve  _ never _ been drunk? Ever?”

Across the table from him, Ben Organa-Solo—the man formerly known as Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, former Supreme Leader of the First Order, son of darkness, heir apparent to whatever, etc etc—glowers, a muscle in his jaw tightening and flexing as he stares Poe down.

“No,” he finally says. “I have not.”

He does not sound amused. Poe, however, cackles at this, and knocks back the majority of his drink. Ben just holds his own ale, and picks at the paper label with his thumbnail. Embarrassment rolls off of him in waves, but...  _ Be nice, _ he thinks to himself. Rey catches the edge of his self-talk, through the bond they share. 

_ Be tame,  _ more like. 

Rey watches this exchange with a tense sort of horror. They’re all seated around a table at a scrap heap of a bar, somewhere in the outer rim, where none of the life forms are likely to even suspect the identity of the dark-haired man who, despite his change in allegiance, still favors a distinctly all-black wardrobe. 

In the company of more simply and, okay, normally-dressed life-forms, that’s enough to garner a few sidelong glances. But nobody here recognizes him, and Rey is grateful for that. If a little on-edge. 

She, Finn, Rose, and Poe, and Ben—all calmly sharing drinks the way normal people do, when they aren’t fighting a galactic war or… trying to survive. It’s weird, and Rey will be the first to admit how absolutely weird this very scenario is; she wouldn’t have blamed them in the slightest if they’d thrown both her and Ben into a cell somewhere—him for what he’s done, and her for proposing that they take his defection seriously. When it had happened, Rey’s best hope was that the Resistance would be merciful enough to throw them in the same cell so they could die together, tragically. 

But here they are instead. Laughing over drinks. 

Life is… strange. 

Well. Poe is laughing. Rose and Finn are looking nervously from Poe to Rey, both of them avoiding Ben’s gaze. Rey hates how much they’re right to do so; their brutal histories with the First Order make their wariness extremely understandable. But Poe is… Poe. The kind of person who is enough of a hothead to take a risk this monumental, the kind of person who’s made his own dumb mistakes and appreciated the second chance. 

And Ben’s intel hasn’t hurt, either. 

Because of his defection, the First Order took an incalculably significant hit. Shipyards were destroyed, training facilities liberated, whole planets freed from the rule of the First Order, shepherded back to self-governance with support of the growing Resistance and a thoughtful Populist government. It was fortunate that there never had been any galaxy-wide video of Kylo Ren’s real face, Rey thought. Although Finn knew. And Rose knew. 

And now they were here, in a bar, with this man who has never been drunk before in his life, apparently. 

“We’ve got to remedy that,” Poe says, decisively, when his laughter has subsided. 

Finn shifts uncomfortably, and wraps his arm around Rose; neither of them say a word. 

Rey glances up at Ben; through their bond—which hasn’t been severed by Snoke’s death, because neither of them thought it would be, just as neither of them believed for a minute he had in any way been responsible for it—she can sense his discomfort and embarrassment. He was sent off to live with Luke at such a young age, and there was no drinking at the Jedi temple; something about keeping the mind clear, the body healthy. And then, after… well, there’s a whole nebulous tangle of memories that Rey knows now isn’t the time to try and sort out, but he glances at her, and she knows that while he certainly did have his vices and ways of coping with what had happened, what he’d done, drinking had never been one of them. 

So now, here they are. 

Poe finishes his drink, gestures for the waiter droid to come over so he can order the next round. Beside her, Rey sees Ben lift his own bottle and take a sip. She does the same. The ale is—well, she knows that it’s meant to be a commonplace, unremarkable brew, but to Rey, it’s light years more palatable than the swill made on Jakku. That stuff could melt the feathers off of a steelpecker. Rumor had it that the really powerful stuff was made with the scrapings of old ion engines. On Jakku, alcohol had exactly one purpose: Making a person forget that they were on Jakku at all. So this is… nice, she supposes. Ben’s brows draw together as he drinks his, catching the tail end of her musings and finding them sad, she can sense, not funny. 

Under the table, she places her hand on his thigh. He doesn’t jump, but, as usual, he responds to her in the Force—a ripple of awareness, tangled need and sensation and protection. It’s sweet, and new, and Rose and Finn  _ still _ aren’t looking at them. 

“A round for the table,” Poe is saying to the droid, who nods its mechanical, beak-shaped head, and chirps an affirmation, before trundling away on its ancient treads. It’s a wonder that thing can even balance a tray; Rey aches to repair it, and when she looks over at Ben once more, he has put the bottle down on the table, and the faintest hint of a smile answers that thought. 

“We’re getting you drunk tonight.” Poe grins at this, and puts his elbows on the table, leaning forward. “This’ll be a night to remember.”

“Assuming he can remember it,” Rose adds, in a not-quite undertone, as the droid brings the tray back to the table. “After drinking  _ those _ .”

Because it’s not five beers that Poe has ordered, oh no. 

* * *

The five little glasses that the droid sets down on their table are filled with an arsenic green concoction that is either smoking, or giving off a faint sort of a mist. It hovers, like a gathering storm cloud, over the glasses where they are grouped, until Poe reaches forward and selects one, wafting the mist or whatever it is away.

“This is called  _ ‘Nat’s Ashes,’ _ ” Poe says, as Finn and Rose reluctantly take their own glass. “No  _ actual _ ashes are in it—but it might remove a small amount of your short-term memories if you have more than one of them, so… cheers!”

“I don’t—” Rose says, but her eyes—and Rey’s, and everyone’s—flick up to Ben, who picks up his glass and tosses it back without a moment’s hesitation. 

He winces, just a little, at the taste. Rey senses through their bond a whole mess of emotions: How many things he wishes he could truly drink to forget; how much he hates that he wants to feel… not liked, exactly, but included, in whatever this is; the awful taste of it, which he relates to some medicine Rey doesn’t recognize. There’s something deeper there, much more concealed: A sense of… having endured worse punishments without complaint. But he locks that away, and Rey doesn’t prod at his barriers. 

Now’s not the time. 

Rey picks up her drink, and decides, after one sniff of it, that it’s definitely a case of gulp to get it over with, not sip and enjoy, and follows suit. 

It’s… awful. 

Painfully awful. 

Rey has no idea, still, what medicine this is like, but she’s positive that she’d much rather risk the wound, injury, or infection that ensues instead of drink it again. She glances up at Ben, recognizing, belatedly, that this is  _ his _ thought, not hers. She’s much too pragmatic for that to be true, which is the thought—unformed, and only slightly muddled—she answers him with, when he meets her eyes. 

_ Sorry, _ his voice says, in her thoughts.  _ This is why Force-sensitives aren’t really supposed to drink. _

Rey nods a little, and does her best to strengthen her own mental shields out of… respect, she supposes, of his privacy, his memories. As close as they are, there are still some spaces which belong only to him, and that’s fair. More than fair. 

Across the table, Finn is making a face, and Rose is coughing, sputtering out the acid-green drink; Poe is laughing so hard he’s practically crying, his cheeks rosy and red. 

“There we go,” he says. “You feelin’ it?”

“I’m definitely feeling something,” Ben replies, his pointed glare at Poe softened only slightly by the very faintest slurring of his words. 

Poe laughs. “Let’s do another one. I have an idea—I bet you haven’t tried these before…”

The droid rolls back over at Poe’s summons. Rey looks back up at Ben, who doesn’t catch her eye at all. No, he’s looking down at the palm of his hand, and Rose is still coughing, and Rey knows she should try and see if her friend is okay, but she feels… soft. Slow. 

_ You okay? _ she asks, through the now-permeable barrier between their linked minds. 

Ben’s response is simply to move his palm from the table down to her thigh. 

Well, then. 

* * *

Here’s the thing about wars: They tend to take up the majority of your waking hours. When Ben came back, Rey hadn’t blamed the Resistance whatsoever in their wariness. He had been clasped in irons and treated like a prisoner, those first few days. She had gone down to visit him, to speak with him, to use her powers—at Poe’s insistence—to deduce whether Ben’s offer was a genuine one, or a threat, a trick somehow.  

It had felt wrong, to pry into his mind. Despite the fact that he had done so—or attempted to do so—to her. Ben hadn’t resisted her, though; he’d flung his mind wide open, given her full permission to go where she wanted, examine everything. The breadth of his power had been staggering. Rey had felt, in that moment, with absolute certainty that Ben could’ve killed her, and all of them, if he had wanted to. It would’ve been easy. And indeed part of him did want to. A dark and twisted and horrible part of him, a part that he loathed and dared not even look at. But Rey looked. 

She looked, and she saw, and she  _ felt _ . 

It hadn’t been a trick. That’s what she had known, and that’s what she had told Poe, and the rest of them. 

Since then, their acceptance of it had been conditional on the usefulness of his intel. 

Since then, any chance for Rey and Ben to be alone—to try and hash out whatever this was between them, his motivations for returning, all those deeper, more private, more emotional bits—had been nonexistent. 

They had wanted Ben to be kept under close observation. And Rey had felt the chafing of that observation, old wounds, re-opened for everyone to see. There were only three people among the Resistance who knew Kylo Ren’s true identity: Rey, Poe, and Leia. Two, now, given Leia’s passing. The brief audience that ‘Kylo Ren’ had been granted before Leia Organa had, Rey hoped, been enough for son to reconcile with mother. 

She hadn’t been there for that. 

So why is she thinking about it, here, in this dingy bar, while a raucous jizz-wailer howls out a tune she doesn’t recognize? Why does she feel the hard press of the ground at her knees, as if she is seeking that absolution before a mother who has grown so lined, so gray, so weary—

_ Sorry, _ she thinks, catching sight of Ben’s eye once more. _ I didn’t mean— _

_ It’s fine, _ he sends back. 

Overspill. Not her thoughts, but his. 

Perfectly fine. 

Across the table from them, Poe laughs, and the droid presents them with five new drinks. Rey’s stomach does a swoop and a flip, like a bad hyperspace jump, at the sight of them. 

“This bad boy’s called ‘ _ The Imperial, _ ’” Poe says, gesturing to the glasses placed before them on the table. It’s ten glasses this time—five tall flutes and five small cups, like the ones their green drinks had been made in. The substance in the tall flute is black, and the one in the smaller cup is clear, and Rey isn’t sure she likes this game any more, and kind of wants to tug Ben’s hand and make him get up from the table with her, right now. But she stays. 

They’re celebrating. They’re socializing. This is fun. 

“You take the small one, and pour it into the big one,” Poe says. “Pretty simple, yeah?”

He does so, and Rey watches as the black liquid turns a violent red color, the two liquids reacting somehow. 

It’s as red as the banners of the once-great First Order. As red as the lining of the cloak that Kylo Ren had worn, when he had made his first announcement as Supreme Leader. It’s that cloak—absurd, really—that Rey thinks about, as Ben’s huge hand closes around the tall flute. He picks it up and examines it, but Rey is mesmerized by the motion of his hand, and the memory, the slip of bare skin against vivid red silk, that—

Ben sputters as the drink goes down; Poe laughs, and Rose sips at hers and makes a face, and Rey feels herself blush as red as the drink, as red as the silk she’s never touched, as red as her mouth when Ben looks over and sees it, ripe and ready to be—

_ I’m sorry,  _ he says again, wiping his own mouth with the back of his hand.  _ The… the drinks… _

_ It’s fine,  _ Rey thinks, in a hasty reply that, were it to be spoken, would be more than a little breathless. Before his mental shields close back down, much more firmly this time, she is left with a fantasy, not a memory—because she knows for a fact she’s never writhed beneath him on that red silk. 

But now that she knows, she wants to. And he very much wants her to as well.

Ben doesn’t look at her for the next ten minutes. 

It feels like torture. 

* * *

Rey realizes entirely too late in this whole drinking adventure that if his thoughts and… fantasies… are spilling over to her, then hers might very well be spilling over to him. She tests this theory, feeling pleasantly warm and soft from the drinks so far, by thinking about how good his hand feels on her thigh, how she wishes he would slide it higher.

He doesn’t move it. But there’s a faint blush on his cheeks, and on the tips of his ears that she can see peeking through his long hair, that suggests her theory is correct. 

Fun, fun, fun. 

No—wrong, and inappropriate. 

(Both? She thinks. Isn’t this whole new alliance about balance?) She tucks the humor of this incongrous thought away, and looks with renewed focus at the next round of drinks.

“A moof-milk mixer,” Poe declares, distributing the drinks with a surprisingly small amount of sloshing onto the table. The drink has absolutely no moof milk in it—at least, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t…”

“Can you even milk a moof?” Rey asks, her voice a little too loud to her own ears, loud enough to carry over the group of [aliens] who have taken to the corner to sing some kind of jizz tune, loudly, over a pre-recorded track. “I thought that was just an expression.”

“If it has breasts—” Poe says, while at the same time Rose leans over with a soft, happy sort of noise into Finn’s broad chest and says, also loudly: “This one is  _ pretty _ .”

It is pretty—and Rose… Rose is most certainly feeling it, her contented relaxation much more evident than it is on Finn, who is bearing it all with a stoic sort of solidity, displaying much more than he feels, Rey suspects, for the sake of Rose. He’s strong for her, and that makes emotion curl within her chest—not jealousy, but a fierce happiness that’s tinged with a melancholy, tinted the way the frozen concoction in the roundish, bell-shaped glass in front of her is tinted. Some kind of plum-purple syrup, dripping down the interior of a blush-pink drink, making it look like a sunset on the edge of a distant storm, the drip of blood as it had coursed down her own cheek when the battle had— 

_ Sorry— _

Rey reaches for the drink, and sips from the straw. Not her thoughts. Not her memories. 

_ —I’m trying— _

_ It’s fine— _

Ben looks at her with a haunted desperation behind his eyes. With an apology, contrite and ashamed and honest. Because he  _ is _ drunk, and he  _ can’t _ stop, and if he drinks this then she’ll  _ know— _

Rey drinks the drink. Poe tells a joke. Rey thinks that she is going to have a headache tomorrow. Just like that, with the brush of his fingertip across her inner wrist, the tendrils of the headache retreat. 

_ I didn’t think the Dark Side could heal like that? _

_ It can’t.  _

Is it her mind, answering his? Or is it the other way around? The drink is empty, but Rey doesn’t remember drinking it. And Poe is waving them up, over to the corner, to where the microphones stand, waiting for their next willing victims. 

“No,” Ben says, aloud this time, which is… helpful, given the effect of the moof-milkers and the… the ashes… 

Rey hears herself laugh. She tugs on his hand, his big, nice, warm, huge hand, holding it in hers. Thinking about how he had stroked her there, moments—or was it hours—ago. 

Time is slipping by, dripping down like blood, or like that purple syrup. 

“I don’t know  _ any _ of these songs,” Finn protests. 

“They put the words up on the screen,” Rose says, reaching up to play with his hair, which Finn has taken to wearing in a longer style, more suited to his personality than the First Order standard cut. “You’ll be great. It’s a love song.”

Rose gets faintly teary-eyed at this as she looks up to Finn, who smiles at her and holds her close; Then the two of them get sufficiently distracted by each other and miss the cue to start singing, and Poe is laughing, having found a handful of glitter from somewhere to shower over both couples. Rey turns to Ben and sees a scattering of multi-colored paper fluter own and land in his dark hair, and it’s the most absurd, wonderful, incongruous thing, her brain almost can’t process it. 

He scowls. 

“I’m not laughing at  _ you _ ,” Rey clarifies—but whatever else she was going to say, however she was going to try and clarify it, it’s lost, when Poe pulls her up onto the little low stage. 

Rey realizes that her hand is entwined with Ben’s. She’s not letting go. And he isn’t either. 

Then they’re on stage together, and the music is still playing, and the night is turning into a smear of color and light. Laughter and music—Rey isn’t singing, she doesn’t know this song either, and Ben is looking into her eyes like there’s a great solemn mystery behind them, and the music plays on, wordless and jangling and too cheerful for what she sees when she meets his gaze. 

White-hot need. Embarrassment. Desire—he wants, more than anything he’s ever wanted, more than power or safety or vengeance. He wants her with such a profound need that it shakes her to her core. He wants her in a way that resonates with the same twinned feeling that rises up out of her own belly. 

Is she answering him? Is he answering her? 

“Is anyone actually going to sing?” Poe hollers, and the crowd laughs around them. Somehow, Finn and Rose are nowhere to be seen. Gone home, Rey thinks, with what little of her brain is left to think. 

Rey pulls Ben off of the stage, through a back doorway, and into the shadowed dark. 

* * *

He drinks her pleasure from her softened mouth, presses her up against the rough wall of the quieter space they’ve somehow stumbled towards, sound and sensation coming through their bodies on distorted, undulating waves.

This is, by far, his favorite drink. The most intoxicating one, too. 

And it feels terrifying, like plunging down the center of an ancient wreck with no rope whatsoever, and the feeling goes on, and on, and it’s him she’s diving into, the swell of his thoughts, now utterly unshielded. All of him, laid bare for her to see. The wreck and the ruin of him, the need, the fear, the pain. 

He is terrifying. 

He makes her feel alive. 

He makes her do nothing that she does not already ache to do—kiss him back, hungrily, almost biting at his soft, clever mouth, a low growl welling up in her throat, or maybe in his, or maybe they’ve passed the point of caring which sounds and sensations belong to which body. 

They are starlight, ancient energy, swirling together in the boundless mysteries of the Force itself, until—

Something pulls her back. 

_ We can’t... _

Suddenly, the walls slam back down. His wounded pride, Rey can feel it, trying and failing to be a steady bulwark against the merging and mingling of their thoughts. It’s as steady as a rusted-out, sand-beaten hull, but the pain in his eyes, the confusion… it guts her. 

“Rey?” he asks, hurt barely concealed in his deep eyes. 

_ She’s pulled away from him; she doesn’t want him.  _

Rey thinks only of the fact that they can’t do this  _ here _ —whatever  _ this _ is, whatever  _ this _ is going to be—not when Poe is waiting for them, probably looking for them, back inside the bar. But her thoughts… everything's so blurry and her head hurts, and she wants to see him laid out on soft sheets, not rough stone. He deserves soft things, good things. And Rey… she is hard, and coarse, and born of the desert. 

Everything is a tangle. 

Ben’s eyes narrow. 

Rey doesn’t understand. She wants him, and he wants her, but—

“There you two are!” Poe says. 

Both of them turn to look at him, and Rey takes a guilty, unsteady step back from where she’s been standing. 

“That’s probably enough for one night,” he continues, smiling, utterly unaware of the tempest of the Force that’s churning and writhing between the two drunk Force-sensitives. “If you’re trying to escape, that’s probably a sign, right?”

Rey can’t make her thoughts catch up with the part of her mind that forms words. Can’t think of what words she would say, to answer this. Because she can only feel scraps and ragged edges of Ben’s thoughts now that he’s giving everything he’s got to shutting her out. 

It’s not working. It’s working entirely too well. And Rey still can’t speak. 

“Well, let’s get you two back to base,” Poe says, approaching them and slapping his arms as best he can around the two of them, Rey on one side and Ben on the other. The height difference means that Poe is much more successful doing it to Rey, who stumbles and leans in closer to him just for pure reflex and a need to steady her feet as they walk, while Poe’s other hand pats somewhere on Ben’s upper back, and Ben flinches away. Another reflex, one born of a pain, a trauma, that Rey doesn’t understand, can no longer make sense of. 

They walk, an odd, imbalanced triad, out from the alleyway and around to the front of the bar. As they pass by, through a larger cluster of patrons who are leaving out the front, one of them jostles Rey as they pass. Rey stumbles—and Ben is there, moving faster than a man his height has a right to move, one hand around the offender’s throat as the male Twi’lek chokes and sputters, already blue skin shading a deeper blue. Time moves too quickly; Rey hears herself call out to him—

“Ben! Stop! I’m alright!”

—but it’s Poe, and the four-armed bouncer out front, who take charge of Ben, separating him. 

“It was a misunderstanding,” Rey says, as the rest of the Twi’lek’s party looks on, simultaneously riled up and cowed by how utterly feral Ben must look to them. One of them—the bouncer—swings, and clocks Ben right in the face. Rey summons her strength and reaches out to them, finds their minds in the Force, does what she can to calm them. 

It must work. 

Because the next thing she remembers is being back on base. Back in what must be Ben’s quarters, otherwise her own have been flipped, mirrored, and that can’t be right…

“He’ll sleep it off,” Poe is saying to her, as they somehow manage to lower Ben’s slack body down onto a bed. 

Rey nods, not really comprehending; she’s so tired, and more than that, so weary, and so sick, and so full of regrets and gaps and things she wishes she could process. 

She finds her way, somehow, to Ben’s ‘fresher. A glass of cold water soothes a little of her sour stomach, and when she comes back to look at him, Ben is out cold, snoring faintly. But even in the low lamp-light, she can see the blossom of bruises on his face, around his eye. He is already turning purple, and she cant help herself, she lifts her hands to trail her fingertips gently down the line of his scar. Maybe it’s her scar. Maybe it’s yet another thing they share, but can’t quite understand. 

She’s so tired. 

Tonight was a mistake. 

_ This is why Jedi don’t drink,  _ she thinks, and she sinks down to the floor, beside Ben’s bed. It never occurs to her to join him atop it; there’s a familiarity there, an expectation, and one she doesn’t deserve. 

* * *

The smell of caf—sweet, delicious, life-sustaining, amazing, fresh-brewed caf—wakes him before the rest of him can catch up.

As soon as it does, as soon as Ben tries to move, he immediately regrets this decision, as well as every past decision which has led him to this hellish moment. He collapses back down on the… the bed, he thinks. 

He is back in his own bed. 

How is he back here? 

Last night is tinted faintly green in his memories—the green of the drink he’d had, before it had all gone sideways. 

Tenderly, he prods his aching face. It comes back to him in scraps and flashes.

_ This is why Force-sensitives don’t drink,  _ Rey’s voice echoes gently in his head. 

Ben sighs, and leans back against the pillow. Her voice is warm and melting, cool and numbing, all at once; he wishes she were here, and not in her own rooms, waking from her own bad night—

_ I’m sorry for whatever I did, or said, last night,  _ he thinks back to her. Drinking isn’t…

_ You can tell me yourself,  _ Rey replies, when his thoughts trail off, distracted by the scent of caf once more. 

And then, to his shock, there she is: Rey, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, holding two mugs of steaming caf. She’s still dressed from last night, and her hair has been finger-combed back into one low loop of a bun, and her eyes are a little sleep-smudged, but she’s still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. 

Well. Second-most beautiful.

“ _ You _ made the caf…” he groans, and she smiles, and brings them over, setting one down on the little table by his bed, cupping the other in her hands and breathing it in. 

“I hope that’s alright,” Rey says. 

Ben looks up at her. It takes him a few sluggish moments to remember that she can’t know what he’s feeling or thinking unless he tells her, or shows her—as opposed to last night, when he’d been utterly unable to keep his shit together at all. Tentatively, he opens up to her. And then she’s there, waiting for him on the other side of their mental doorway, warm and curious. 

She’s tired as well, desperately so; her body aches from—

“Of course it’s alright,” he says, voice soft. “Rey… did you… why did you sleep on the floor?”

She shrugs, and blows on her caf to cool it. “It’s fine, I didn’t— I’ve slept in worse places.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

He’s too tired to move. She’s too sore for anything acrobatic. So instead of moving at all, he just opens his thoughts wide to her and shows her what it is he wants with her. Shows her, precisely just how okay it would have been, had she joined him in bed. 

Not for sex. Neither of them would’ve been able to do much of anything last night. 

And right now, anything that involves rhythmic movement seems like an incredibly bad idea, too.

But Rey sets her caf down on the table, beside his, and climbs into bed, beside him, and curls up against his warmth like she belongs there. 

He tugs on the Force, a mingling of Light and Dark, and wraps it around her, easing her aches. 

She sighs, and lets her healing flow into him, and the pressure in his head eases, and abates. 

At some point, the caf grows cold, and both of them sink back into sleep. There will be time enough, in this borrowed future, for them to discover what this is between them. The war is almost over. The new world has come. 

And Ben’s Worst Day Ever is finally over. 


End file.
